Projects

October 8, 2008 - Posted by yohman

Experience Karnak

The colossal site of Karnak is one of the largest temple complexes in the world, with an incredibly rich architectural, ritual, religious, economic, social and political history. The Amun-Ra precinct, which includes an astonishing number of individual temples, shrines and processional ways, stands as a micro-cosmos of ancient Egypt.

We invite you to experience Karnak – to learn about an ancient site that still resonates today because of its monumental pylons, towering columns, stunning reliefs and architectural marvels. Enter the temple precinct and discover its rich religious, political and architectural history.

The Digital Karnak Project was designed and built at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under the direction of Dr. Diane Favro (director of the ETC) and Dr. Willeke Wendrich (editor-in-chief of the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology).

What if you could know where the Berlin Wall once stood while walking in Berlin today? What if you could visit a city at any point in time, create a social network through time and space, and seamlessly interface between the past and the physical world of today? With content generated by architects, historians, urban sociologists, and archaeologists, as well as the general public, “HyperCities” are content rich, interactive digital spaces for exploring, learning about, and traveling to the great cities of the world. Using the Google Maps API with an innovative interface and database that allows users to drill down, search, and network through time and space, HyperCities make the past come alive. Berlin is the first in a series of HyperCities that will soon include New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. Users begin in the present using Google Maps satellite imagery and navigate their way through time by unveiling layers of geo-referenced historical maps, annotating family genealogies, searching by a single city block over centuries of time, and finally interfacing with the physical world with locative technologies.

Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, in collaboration with the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, UCLA Academic Technology Services, the UCLA Office of Instructional Development, the UCLA Academic Senate, and the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge.

The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA is a research group exploring applications for real-time visual simulation in design, urban planning, emergency response, and education. Virtual L.A. is a long-term effort to build a real-time visual simulation model of the entire Los Angeles basin. The team has already finished major sections of the city including downtown, the Pico Union district, El Pueblo, Mid-Wilshire, Wilshire-"Miracle Mile," LAX, Westwood, UCLA, Hollywood Blvd. and Vine St., MacArthur Park, Playa Vista, the Figueroa corridor, and a portion of South Central. Negotiations are currently underway for other areas of the city. The UCLA portion of Virtual L.A. is funded by the Chancellor's Office and UCLA Capital Programs, and is currently being used to plan and evaluate new construction on campus.

The Roman Forum was the heart of ancient Rome, yet it has rarely been reconstructed as a totality. The UCLA Roman Forum Project uses real-time technology to model the entire Forum as it appeared in the late Empire. Viewers can move in and through the buildings evaluating sightlines and spatial arrangements, experiencing different lighting conditions, and hearing Latin conversations, among other features. The carefully researched whole is linked to comprehensive metadata available to a broad audience on an NSF-sponsored website.

The UCLA Roman Forum Project Temple of Artemis Project examines different representational techniques used for documenting and understanding this enormous building in Sardis, Turkey. Elegant measured drawings, detailed virtual reality digital models showing sequential building phases, a combined digital-drawing-model depicting hand drawings in 3d, and a projected physical model made from a 3d scan will form the basis for a exhibition exploring both the building’s evolution and the effectiveness of different types of representations to convey information.

Special thanks to all the sponsors, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, UCLA Academic Technology Services, the Steinmetz Family, Intel, and all the others who made the Digital Roman Forum Project possible.

ANCIENT ROME

A significant portion of the work of the ETC has been centered on reconstructions of ancient Rome. Generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the creation of the Roman Forum, the civic center of ancient Rome, as it appeared in late antiquity. NSF funding subsequently allowed these models to be repurposed for use on the web. ETC scholars are currently at work on reconstructions of other landmark Roman structures including the Colosseum, the Basilica Maxentius, the Circus Maximus, and a schematic representation of Republican Rome.

For information on specific buildings of the Roman Forum, visit the Digital Roman Forum. This NSF-funded website was developed to make the interactive computer models of the forum structures more broadly available over the Internet. The website provides images, QuickTime panoramas, and information on the digital reconstructions of twenty features (buildings and major monuments) within the forum.

Google Earth kml file of the Roman Forum
(To use this file you must have Google Earth loaded on your computer. Left click on the link and 'Open with Google Earth.' In the 'Place' section of the left sidebar in Google Earth, double click on the 'UCLA ETC Roman Forum' entry. Drag the time slider to the right to view the monumental evolution of the Forum. (Be patient. Some of the more complex monuments will take a few seconds to load.) Use as you would any other Google Earth 3-D model.)

Rome Reborn (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia)